Conventional computing environments may provide a mechanism for associating a time or date (hereinafter “revision date”) artifact into a data set. Many computing environments purport to provide a user with a revision date artifact that reflects meaningful changes to the data set (e.g., changes that are meaningful from the perspective of a user); however, these conventional computing environments may provide the user with a revision date artifact that reflects, for example, the last time the file that contains the data set was saved, opened or printed. Conventional computing environments may provide the user with these revision date artifacts even though these artifacts may not represent meaningful changes to the data set from the user's perspective.
Conventional revision dating techniques may be used in several types of computing environments, such as document processing environments and/or revision control system (RCS) environments. For example, document processing environments, such as Microsoft Word®, Microsoft PowerPoint® or Microsoft Excel® from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. offer several alternatives for incorporating a time/date into a document (e.g., a text document, a slide show, or a spreadsheet). The times/date information may be incorporated as static text (i.e., manually entered by a user) or may be programmatically updated when a document is opened or printed (e.g., via an object).
Further, some document processing environments provide users with an option to track changes in a document. When the option is enabled, a user can track the addition or deletion of text in the document using an indicator associated with the changes in the document. In some cases, the user can decide which changes in the document are indicated using a filter operation that is provided by the document processing environment. For example, the user can decide that changes associated with user A should be indicated, while changes associated with all other users should not be indicated. These filtering operations hide indicators associated with changes that the user does not wish to view. The hidden indicators associated with these changes still exist in the document, but are simply filtered out so they are not displayed to the user.
RCS environments may include known approaches for maintaining a repository of data sets. A RCS environment may provide a mechanism for tracking revisions and changes to data sets by allowing a user to check data sets into the RCS environment. When a data set is checked into the RCS environment, the data set may be assigned a time, date, and/or revision object. Subsequently, the data set may receive an update to the time, date and/or revision object when the data set is checked into the RCS environment. RCS environments, however, may not interpret data in the data set because RCS environments may lack knowledge about formats of the data sets, and therefore may not identify a revision or may improperly identify that a revision has occurred when no revision was made to the data set from the perspective of a user.